I made cupcakes! I used the ice cream and cake mix recipe from the Cake Mix Doctor book last night – one box of white cake mix, three eggs, two cups of ice cream (melted). This time it worked (you may remember, last time I made it I didn’t look at the recipe first so I didn’t use the eggs and it, um, didn’t work at all). I used the suggested ice cream, Cherry Garcia. I’m a little disappointed, I was expecting more cherry bits. I also forgot to measure two cups of ice cream and just threw the whole pint in there, but they seem fine. Hm, is a pint two cups? [update: yes it is] They are very yummy cupcakes, and look so darn normal I didn’t bother taking a picture. I used tin foil cupcake liners (with the paper liners on the inside) because wuzzled from Glitter mentioned chocolate bits may fall to the bottom and make it messy. I’ll let you know if this is the case for Cherry Garcia as well.

As for tin foil liners. They come tin foil with a paper liner inside. I always used to think it was because tin foil was more expensive to produce and they were padding the stack. But I remembered Martha Stewart has a thing about not letting tin foil touch your food, aluminum and alzheimers and all that. I caught her on Car Talk (I’m an obsessive NPR listener) and she was talking about this, hinting that it was nearly a conspiracy on the part of the aluminum foil makers. I’m most likely exaggerating, but this is how I remember it. I don’t watch a lot of food tv or cooking shows, so I don’t know if this it is an understood thing that one should line aluminum with parchment paper so the food is safe. What do you guys think? Understood? Conspiracy?

I *heart* my mini pencam. I’ve had it three days and it’s definitely the toy I expected it to be. What I didn’t expect was just how small it is. Even this picture didn’t prepare me. It’s about one half the size of a pack of cigarettes. And it takes surprisingly good pictures. They’re big when they come off the camera – 1248 x 960 pixels. It’s perfect for those “I wish I had a camera” moments.

The Onion’s Stat Shot for the week is “Top Hiccup Cures”, so I feel compelled to dig in my archives and pull out how I cure hiccups which (mostly) works. There are some great cures in the comments too.

Darn! I recently ordered the mini pencan because it was “cuter” than the new pencam mega – but now I find that the mega has macro focus (up close), which I use a lot. Of course, I didn’t read the product description close enough to figure that out the first time around. I’ll get the mega instead, but I adore how teeny the mini pen cam is! It even comes with a lanyard so you can wear it as jewelry. Sigh.

update: the mini has the little macro focus ring as well, see the comments for more than you wanted to know